Jay Vaughan, 2008-08-13 14:42:23 +0200 :
>> Idea of Open Source projects is to release them before they're
>> ready, to let community work on them as well.
>> That would be fine in our case, *if* we could work on them
> concurrently, but there is so much cruft in dealing with the build
> environment - and too many forks in the details - that it makes it
> very unproductive to try to contribute.
Oh come on. After reading all your (and others') scary messages
about that, I decided to give it a try. So I pointed my browser to
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/MokoMakefile. Half an hour later, I had
a build in progress. Most of that half-hour was spent waiting for
stuff to download, and part of the rest was due to my running the
whole stuff in a particular isolated environment (cowbuilder chroot,
for those who care) with its own characteristics (stuff runs as root,
and I didn't have a home directory).
Of course, the build hasn't completed yet (I have a few *.ipk
already, but the webpage mentions 5 hours on a computer that's rather
faster than mine), but if pasting less than 15 commands straight from
a web page is too high a barrier to entry for prospective developers,
I doubt they'd be able to accomplish much even if it was a single
command to run.
Half an hour. 15 commands to copy and paste. How much more
hand-holding does a developer need?
Roland.
--
Roland Mas
A man walks into a bar.
Bang.